New Substantive Revision to the SEP Entry on the Epistemology of Modality

 Here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yablo's "Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?": Classic Papers in Modal Epistemology Series

The publication of Yablo's 1993 PPR paper, "Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?" is widely considered a watershed in the history of the epistemology of modality. It's perhaps the most widely cited paper in the subfield to date. And while the subfield has progressed considerably since its publication, it still repays revisiting. And given the blog's aims, I've typed up a fairly careful outline of Yablo's paper. There are still some gaps, so I'll come back in due course to fill them in. 1. Introduction 1.1. Some statements express true propositions about what is metaphysically possible; others do not. 1.2. How can we tell the difference between the two? 1.3. The standard philosophical answer is captured by Hume’s maxim regarding conceivability-possibility inferences:  1.4. Hume’s (modal epistemology) Maxim: “‘Tis an establish'd maxim in metaphysics, that whatever the mind clearly conceives, includes the idea of possible existence, or...
Read more

Kung's Modal Epistemology

Image
 Peter Kung offers the most sophisticated version of imagination-based modal epistemology to date. His account is grounded in an account of the nature of sensory imagination that’s informed by recent work on the subject in philosophy and the sciences. The core idea is that sensory imaginings have two kinds of content: qualitative and assigned. Qualitative content consists in mental imagery, which represents a distribution of objects and their qualities in three-dimensional egocentric space.  By contrast, assigned content consists in the labels and descriptions we assign to the objects and properties represented by the sensory content of imagination. According to Kung, the two components of imaginative content differ markedly in terms of the ways in which they can confer justification on a possibility claim. The qualitative content of an imagining can indicate what’s metaphysically possible in virtue of demonstrating a consistent way of “filling in” three-dimensional space....
Read more

Precis of Van Inwagen's "Modal Epistemology": Classic Papers in Modal Epistemology Series

In “Modal Epistemology” ( Phil. Studies , 1998), Peter van Inwagen defends a mitigated form of modal skepticism. In particular, he argues that while we have knowledge of many modal claims that are close to the practical concerns of everyday life, science, and even (in some cases) philosophy (e.g., Gettier possibilities), we can’t have knowledge, or even reasonable belief, regarding possibility claims remote from ordinary experience (e.g., the possibility of disembodied souls, Anselmian beings, and instances of gratuitous evil). Van Inwagen further clarifies his version of mitigated modal skepticism by means of an analogy. Just as, in prescientific times, humans confidently formed false perceptual beliefs about distant objects (e.g., the distance of the celestial bodies from the Earth) on the basis of their reliability regarding perceptual judgements about nearby objects, so in the present day philosophers erroneously form confident beliefs about “distant” possibilities on the basis of ...
Read more